The Fiction of Learning as Administratively Plannable

Abstract

The Primary Education Act, passed in 1920 by the German Weimar Republic and introducing both compulsory education and common attendance of elementary school for four years, can be considered as the essential milestone on the road to modern schooling. Previously, parents had merely been obliged to give their children some (possibly private) lessons. Introducing compulsory education also compelled the state to provide a sufficient number of schools in the quality required (cf. e.g. Nevermann & Schulze-Scharnhorst, 1987, p. 82). The common primary school replaced the “column-principle”, where children from different social strata were assigned to different types of education from pre-school onwards by a “fork principle”, with this split first occurring after four years of shared education in primary school.